Elder David Allen Parady has been called to the Florida Tampa Mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Always Be Prepared

David says he is only allowed to email family members. Anyone can still email him, and if you'd like him to write you back, please let him know your home address for snail mail. :)

From David...

"We taught the first lesson to Angel and his family on Friday (two weeks ago.) In the conversations we'd had before, I've figured that they might as well already be members of the church. Angel thinks that we're the best young men he's ever met; he hates it when guys are disrespectful, especially because he has five daughters. He only wants them to have one pair of earrings and he hates tattoos. All of the kids have a curfew of 9. When we were going to start the lesson, which is about the Restoration, they kept asking perfect questions having to do with what we were going to talk about, like why there are so many churches, and why people go to church on Sundays but go about drinking and stuff the rest of the week. The lesson went really well and we answered a lot of their questions. The next day they invited us to play tennis and go to lunch with them. That was pretty fun, even though I was terrible at tennis."

I had asked him if they are eating well...

"We seriously get too much food out here. Members and nonmembers alike just have this weird need to give us food every time we see them. Yesterday we got a huge tub full of storage food that was nearing its expiration date. We have more than we could ever eat in our apartments. It's pretty funny."

"Church went well yesterday, but not as many of the investigators came as last week. We taught Gospel Principles again, this time about the Holy Ghost and prayer. Melissa, the mother of the Gonzales family, participated a lot. After church there was a stake youth fireside scheduled at about 6 at our building. President Summerhays was going to speak about preparing to serve a mission. At about 3, though, Sister Summerhays called us and told us that he had thrown up three times in the past hour and wouldn't be able to make it. She asked if we would be able to take over. It was a huge surprise. We didn't really commit to anything, since she said that she would call the stake young men's leader who was in charge of it, but we immediately started trying to prepare. I wasn't too worried since I had given that talk in sacrament meeting before I left, so I thought I would just kind of recycle it.

"It turned out that we didn't have to do anything. The stake young men's president had managed to gather three other people and they all gave a few small talks. It went well, considering how long they had to prepare. But it did show us that we always had to be ready for anything while we're here."